Becky Roe
By Jeff Herman
Scott Fitzgerald once said: “There are no second acts in American lives.” But he never met Becky Roe.
Becky is a Seattle native. She grew up in Northeast Seattle, and graduated from Nathan Hale High School in 1969. From the time she was in high school, she wanted to go to law school. She competed in debate, and loved U.S. History and politics. She says: “I don’t remember any one moment when I decided on it, but everything I liked just naturally seemed to lead to law.”
Becky went to UW and graduated in 1973, receiving a BA in Political Science. She was an enthusiastic student of Jon Bridgeman, the legendary history professor, at UW. She considered going to graduate school for a Ph.D. in Modern European History, but decided against it when she learned she would need extensive training in German. “Languages are not my best subject,” she laughs. She also took independent study in Political Science and spent two quarters as a legislative intern in Olympia, working for a State Senator.
After receiving her bachelor’s degree, Becky took a year off before law school, working at the Sand Point Country Club, managing the pool. Then she went to University of Puget Sound School of Law (now Seattle University School of Law), when it was located at the Benaroya Business Park in Tacoma. “It was in a strip mall,” she says with amusement. UPS was a new law school then. She was in the third or fourth graduating class. While at UPS, she was on Law Review with Michael Hayden, who is now a King County Superior Court judge.
While Becky was in law school, she started working at the King County Prosecutor’s Office. That is when the first act of her life began.
She began as a Rule Nine intern in Juvenile Court, trying juvenile crime cases before Superior Court judges on their Juvenile Court rotation. “It was mostly the big offenses that kids commit, like minor in possession,” she jokes. But she got hooked on the experience of going to trial.
After graduating from UPS, Becky was hired by the King County Prosecutor’s Office as a Deputy Prosecutor. At first, she was assigned to Shoreline District Court, for about a year. “It was a blast,” she says fondly. She tried mostly DUI cases, and loved it.
After that, she was sent back to Juvenile Court. During this tour she first got interested in sexual assault cases. There were several more-senior deputies in Juvenile Court who wanted to take a more vigorous approach to prosecuting sexual assault, including J. Kathleen Learned, now a retired Superior Court judge. Becky quickly signed on.
The Prosecutor’s Office then sent her to Adult Felonies. After that, she teamed up with Mary Kay Barbieri and Robert Lasnik to form one of the first Special Assault Units in the country. This unit focused on prosecuting sex crimes, and mastering the complicated forensic skills necessary to win them. Before there was a Law & Order “Special Victims Unit,” there was a real one in King County --the King County Prosecutor’s Sexual Assault Unit, known as the SAU.
In 1981, Becky was promoted to Senior Deputy, and had to do tours of duty with the Filing Unit, and as Second Assistant at Juvenile Court. Mark Sidran was supervising the prosecutor’s office at Juvenile Court at the time. She then returned to her favorite cause, prosecuting sexual assault crimes. She worked at SAU from 1982 until she left the Prosecutor’s Office in 1994.
Jeff Robinson, now one of her partners at Schroeter Goldmark & Bender, was once her opposing counsel. “When Becky was a prosecutor, I tried a case against her. A young man was accused of sexually assaulting young women around Harborview Hospital. We did his third trial. She was a fierce opponent, but at the same time, she was really human. Mike Iaria, my co-counsel, and I called her at home the night before closing arguments. We were just exhausted. We said we wanted to split the closing argument between us. It was pretty much unheard of, and I’m convinced if she’d objected the judge wouldn’t have let us do it. Instead of objecting, she agreed. She was not looking for a tactical advantage because of our exhaustion, she was just respectful to us and said sure, go ahead. She now has the office next to mine, and we work on cases together sometimes. It’s such a pleasure to be on the same side as her, rather than opposing her. She is as serious and diligent a lawyer as I’ve ever met, but she can turn it off and enjoy life and have fun. She’s one of the lawyers that I respect the most. That’s why I approached her and asked her to join our firm.”
In 1994, Jeff Robinson and the other partners at Schroeter Goldmark & Bender offered her the chance to try civil plaintiffs’ work. She says, “I did some soul-searching for a couple of months, and I realized I don’t want to have done just one thing before I finish my career. I decided I’d never get a better chance to change over than I was offered at Schroeter. So I made the switch.”
She’s content with her decision. “I’ve never had one day’s regret about my decision. Thus began the second act of her life.
Becky likes the variety of her work at Schroeter Goldmark & Bender. She does wage and hour class action litigation, and recently finished a six-week trial in Oregon. She also does employment litigation, sexual assault civil cases, and civil cases arising from crimes. She likes the creativity she gets to express as a civil plaintiff’s attorney.
In her sparse free time, she runs frequently. She has done five marathons, but no longer competes. She also likes to go biking and is an avid reader. She belongs to a book club and a movie club. She likes to garden with her husband, although she says “he’s a better gardener than I am.” They have a well-tended rose garden, and she grows a wide variety of flowers and herbs. They also like to spend time at a beach place up on Whidbey Island, and with her siblings, who still live in the area.
Becky Roe spent the first twenty years of her career as a ground-breaking prosecutor, then nimbly jumped into plaintiff’s civil practice. Her career shows us that, contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s saying, there are second acts in some American lives. n
Jeffrey L. Herman practices personal injury litigation with the Law Offices of Bradley Johnson in Seattle.
